In 1986, Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales co-authored the groundbreaking mother-daughter collaboration, Getting Home Alive. Twenty-six years later, this new collection of short stories, fictional and autobiographical, gathers the fruits of a forty year collaboration in a final tribute to an extraordinary literary and political partnership. Once again their voices weave a call and response, their stories echoing each other, exploring aging, death and dying, women's struggles for self-assertion, and the persistence of love.

"Nights while the stars swung overhead we leaned in slow, delicious free fall toward each other’s arms, knowing we would arrive in our own good time. Apples, berries, nuts, pumpkins, late corn all spilled their abundance from the roadside stands. Around us the trees glowed in the colors of sun-ripe fruit, flickering and bright as faces turned to a hidden fire. But all the time the roots were reaching for a place deeper than the approaching frost, a race against the tilt of the earth's axis." from "First Snow" by Aurora

"They lived now in a torrent of strife broken by small intimate truces. He spent his waking hours rehearsing what to say next, waiting for her to come back into the room to dispute or contradict and more and more frequently, to tell her what he felt, the anger, the grief at his life curtailed. The emptiness of no future. They cried together then. And sometimes, in the middle of his ever more frequent drugged sleeps, a quivering sensation woke him, a feeling he tentatively, reluctantly, identified as joy." from "Last Rites" by Rosario

"Our people have always been good at digesting even the most indigestible items on life's menu. Insults that would give a conquistador a heart attack-- we have learned to wipe them off our faces and put the handkerchief away for later consideration. Sometimes our pockets bulge with insults, and personally, I have a little red leather coin purse that I had to quit using because it wouldn't close anymore. There were so many insults and so few coins that I was always turning up something nasty whenever I dug around for a subway token. When you run out of storage space, sometimes a hiss or sneer or some offhand and cheerful piece of disrespect goes down your throat and your stomach has to deal with it. It's not easy. It gives you heartburn like you wouldn't believe, but we can do it. All of us are experts"